I might have known that the Judge, if he were still in the library, was not alive, and I might have noticed, as I went through his sleeping-room to climb out on the roof of the front porch, that he had not been to bed at all. But it was all a blank to me. I did not remember that there was a Judge. Fire and its licking tongue was after me and I threw myself off the hot tin roof and landed among the hydrangea bushes below. In a second more I felt the cool grass of the lawn under my running feet, and the first time that I felt my reasoning power come to me I found myself wondering how I had stopped to button a skirt and throw a shawl around my shoulders. There were half a dozen men. Where they had come from I do not know. They were rushing here and there across the lawn and vaulting the fence. They did not seem to notice me at all. I heard one of them shout, "The fire alarm won't work! You can't save the house!" Everything seemed confused. Other people were coming down the street, running and shouting, sparks burst out somewhere and whirled around and around in a cloud, as if they were going up into the black sky on a spiral staircase. The walls of the grocery and the Fidelity Building and the Danforths' residence across the street were all lit up with the red light, and a dash of flames, coming out our library window, shriveled up a shrub that grew there as if it was made of dry tissue paper. "How did it start?" yelled a man, shaking me. I only opened my mouth and looked at him. He was the grocer. I had ordered things from him every morning. "Well, who was in the house?" he said. "The Judge," I said. "The Judge is in the house!" he began to roar. "The Judge is in the house!" It sounded exactly like the telephone when it says, "The line is busy, please ring off," and it seemed to make the people run together in little clusters and point and move across the lawn to where the sparks were showering down, and then back, like a dog that wants to get a chop-bone out of a hot grate. Suddenly every one seemed to turn toward me, and in a minute all those faces, pink and shiny, were around me. "She got out!" they screamed and shouted. "Where's the Judge? Any one else?" "The Judge and the baby!" I cried and sat down on the grass. "No!" shouted the depot master. "The Judge is all right. I just met him walking over the bridge after the freight had gone through. It wasn't twenty minutes ago. But you can't save a thing--not a stick of furniture. The whole thing is gone from front to back on the ground floor already!" "Here's the Judge now! That's him running with the straw hat in his hand," a woman shrieked, and ran out toward him with her hair flying behind. I could see his tall figure, with its long legs, come hurdling across the street. I could see his white face with the jaw square and the lips pressed tight together. "You!" he said, bending down. "Yes! Where's Julianna? Where's my baby?"